Santa Claus Politics – Thomas Sowell @ Townhall.com

Thomas Sowell has a great piece tying the recent politician’s Christmas ad and the current economic situation in the USA entitled Santa Claus Politics.

Having celebrating Christmas in Iowa with my parents, I had several opportunities to watch some of these ads. After a while, it was better to ignore them since it was overwhelming to hear all the things these candidates will do for us. In Mr Sowell’s analysis of these commercials, he states:

Anyone who believes that the government can give the country presents has fallen for the oldest political illusion of all — the illusion of something for nothing.

It confirms my belief on why I would not want the government to help me with every little problem in the world. Sometimes I would like them to stay out and leave us hard working Americans alone. I had to laugh when Mr Sowell shared this item:

If taking our money and wasting it — or, rather, using it to buy votes — was all the damage that politicians did to the economy, that would be Utopia compared to all the damage they actually do.

What’s more, politicians can picture themselves as the solutions to our economic problems, when in fact they are the biggest economic problem of all.

How true of our politicians today.

In further analysis, Mr Sowell states how Hoover, Roosevelt, and Nixon tried to “do something” to fix the economy thinking it would make a difference. But in the end, it resulted in little success for the long term. But, later in his analysis, I learned about how the government could “do nothing” and let the economy work itself out:

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan decided to do nothing — despite bitter criticisms in the media — and the economy recovered on its own and kept on growing.

If we are patient today, it might just work itself out right and the economy will continue to grow. Maybe we need to consider electing people to office who have a good economic understanding, instead of lawyer types who want to sue someone for something and spend our money for their special pork projects.